In wireless communication systems, it is common for receivers to perform a correlation on the preamble of a received signal, and to use the output of that correlation to synchronize the receiver to the received signal (i.e., to identify the beginning of the data portion of the signal). In these communication systems the received signal may have propagated along several different paths (i.e., a multipath channel) after being transmitted by a transmitter. The multipath channel can induce distortion into the signal (e.g., multipath delay spread). These channel-induced distortions introduce uncertainty and therefore errors into the synchronization provided by the preamble correlation. There remains a continuing need for improved methods for synchronizing receivers in wireless communication systems.